


things we fall into (and then fall out of)

by clytemnestras



Series: Star Girls In Sweatpants [9]
Category: Doctor Who (2005), The Vampire Diaries (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Dark, F/F, Femslash Big Bang Monthly Challenge, Stargirls Universe
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-27
Updated: 2016-03-27
Packaged: 2018-05-29 08:53:26
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,830
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6368173
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/clytemnestras/pseuds/clytemnestras
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>a ghost like me tried to love a monster </i><s>boy</s> <i>girl like you,</i><br/><i>and you crushed me</i></p>
            </blockquote>





	things we fall into (and then fall out of)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [kwritten](https://archiveofourown.org/users/kwritten/gifts).



> for the prompt: dark! stargirls,  
>  _a ghost like me tried to love a monster_ ~~boy~~ _girl like you_  
>  _and you crushed me_  
>  _you scooped me up into the palm of your scaling hand_  
>  _and caressed the nothingness of my body_  
>  _and caressed_  
>  _and caressed_  
>  _until you had me_  
>  _you wrapped your fingers around my sinuous frame_  
>  _and crushed me_  
>  _until i dwindled down into_  
>  _nothingness_  
>  _until i screamed out_  
>  _you didn’t let go until i agreed to haunt you_  
>  and loosely inspired by the monthly challenge [heroes vs villains](http://femslashbb.livejournal.com/12457.html)  
> 

The Inhale

 

_ This is the story of how I died. _

 

This is a lie. The first time she died she had looked into the abyss and the abyss looked back and said,  _ oh, lovely thing, oh adhere to me.  _ The first time came the fall of the man underpinned by the fall of the universe. She drank down the stars and their violence was a bloody kiss; destruction fuses to beautiful souls so easily it’s hardly a change. 

 

A wolf becomes a girl becomes a force unmatched in the universe becomes Kali becomes a  _ killer killer killer  _ thing.

 

*

 

She is nineteen and feels raw and young and can hardly force her body out of bed. Falling asleep at 2pm just to remember the taste of curling smoke the night before school ended pressing and pressing her whole body against the sand and pulling Lauren’s hips against hers. Jackie sits on the end of the bed and asks, gentler, fainter, by the day; “Sweetie, get up, please?”

 

She thinks of Lauren’s mouth - how she bit down too hard. How her skin was raw and marked for a week. She thinks about how her ribs still show just slightly like they did last year, like they do on the women in those old horror films when their hair cascades down their back and their lips part in pain or ecstasy when the beast comes to claim them for the dark. 

 

She thinks of Lauren’s waist and how it fit her hips, the same as when they wrestled in PE and the false nails came off in her skin and the teacher had to tear them off of each other and the two of them were stood, sweating, panting,  _ grinning  _ and utterly ready to launch again.

 

*

 

He kisses her to try and steal it away and she’s ready to slide her hands into his ribcage and pull both hearts out. 

 

The universe belongs inside  _ her.  _

 

They kiss and the wilderness living in her crawls up her throat so it may slit his.

 

It lies dormant inside for the longest time.

 

*

 

After the first summer when everybody leaves she begins a lot of things; chainsmoking to feel that dirty flush in her lungs, drinking long and late into the morning to erase herself for the headached moments where throwing up in the rubbish bin feels like something filthy-glorious, fucking people she shouldn’t - no, fucking people she  _ should, _ just for the satisfaction of leaving in the morning with fuck all of her but a memento mori in the form of a love-bitten throat. 

 

The pretty girls went to the country with their pretty boys in tow, ready for pretty babies and pretty dogs and pretty bullshit lives of juicy couture and fake MAC lipstick in sickly pink. The smart girls fucked off to uni and took the whole world with them. What remains is this: Rose, and her bitterness, and the day after the day after next.

 

*

 

So, he changes, but so does she; every small meanness inside, what she would smother and bury before - it  grows like a fire in her guts and twists along her spine until it’s every other nerve, angry and dangerous.

 

In 1879 a wolf stares into her eyes and quivers, and when no one is watching, she growls back. 

 

Sometimes now, when she steps inside the tardis a dark, wheezing noise cuts through her skull, warning and terrified. Sometimes when she steps inside and he isnt around the dark curls up around her like a comfort and says  _ I will warp with you  _ and it feels like total comfort. 

 

*

 

The thing about Rose is she isn't stupid. She knows a lot of things but can't force her head into bullshit academia when her language is urban legend.

 

_ Your father always said _ is her favourite myth, no way of telling what about it might be true. 

 

Her father always said,  _ “Keep your chin up, girl. Nothing gets to put you down.”  _ So she walked with her face tilted towards the sky all summer, her skin burnt red and peeling, Jackie shaking her head as they cleaned up, saying, “You’ll be the death of me.”

 

Her father always said,  _ “There’s things out there, Rose, wonderful things, just waiting for you to trip on them”,  _ and she walks on tiptoes for three years, on and off, hoping she might trip and he will be magically there to pull her back to her feet. 

 

Her father always said,  _ “Give the world hell” _ , and Rose scrapes her knees all over the concrete pavements and vows to do her best. 

 

*

 

The universe slides its way in and out of her eyes and the tardis has itself wrapped around her and she hears something very quiet and very loud. She hears a heartbeat slowly dying; breaths struggling, gasping, slowing. 

 

Somewhere in the universe a girl is dying, and in that same body, a nightmare is being born.

  
  
  
  


The Exhale

 

After the monster sits inside her, Caroline feels the warmth leech slowly from her skin, even with the sun slipping in shafts through her window.

 

Her skin is thick and pale and cold, a cadaver body hung around her, twisted under the hospital sheets. 

 

When the dark splits her open, the hunger comes, and everything is blissful again. 

 

*

 

Later, when they’re running, her guts twist and her throat stings and without thought she launches herself at Rose, rips into her skin and drinks long and deep. When she pulls off, sated and quiet, skin blossoming  with warmth again, Rose is watching her - fingernails dark with Caroline’s blood, a small smile on her face.

 

This, more than anything, is what she revels in. One moment where control slips and still her body drives her on ready to ruin everything for another moment of life.

 

She is hungry, suddenly, for more.

 

For everything. 

 

*

 

Before, when Caroline is the thing with fingers stuck to Elena’s heels; before, when there were boys but never  _ boys, _ the right kind, the shiny-teeth, sharp jaw boys that were meant to be her kind. Before, before Matt, there was Vicky.

 

She couldn’t let Tyler have this first. 

 

Just silly things, really. Vicky would sit and sneer at her in the Real World, Barbie Princess Girl with a God complex out to gentrify the highschool experience. But in the quiet universe of her bedroom, when Matt was out at practice and their mother christ-knows where Vicky would hold Caroline's hands like a fortune teller and breathe smoke into her mouth and nothing but the way their hearts synced up (thumbs against pulse points against mirror images) could even touch them.

 

They could savage each other later. Claw marks. Bite marks. That precious burning sting when their words really sank in.

 

But that moment, all warm mouths and dirty secrets, God. That was the closest thing to living she had.

 

*

 

They end up in the woods one night, and it’s the same as Tyler, as him dropping onto all fours and breaking apart, instinct begging him to tear her open.

 

It’s the same when her back hits the tree, the ground, when Rose is above her all shining eyes and  _ gold gold gold _ dripping from her like stardust. When Rose grabs her hips and yanks down her jeans it's like running when all her breath leaves her lungs, and it's like fear when she feels a hot mouth gliding over her skin in that awful hungry way.

 

The dirty ground smells the same.

 

Rose does bite, and she does ruin, does tear every part of Caroline open with her mouth and with her dangerous eyes and when her back is arched and her body starts to quiver, fingers sunk deep into the moist earth, Caroline lets that gold fill her dark.

 

*

 

This is Caroline’s secret, with her careful smiles and meticulous dress and perfect goddamn plan: she doesn't care.

 

One night in the middle of summer, her, Bonnie, Elena, Matt and Tyler took a trip down to the lake, nothing packed but liquor and bravado. The water coloured all of their skin in new, sweet ways, and the liquor blurred the lines between them, too.

 

Tyler wants her to kiss her best friends? God doesn't watch out here, so what does it matter to her. Bonnie’s mouth is soft and sticky with whiskey and Elena’s is free and pliant and Tyler’s is wide, wide open when they all come up for air. 

 

When she dares Elena, it's to hold her hand over the campfire for as long as she can stand. Two minutes twenty three seconds of bubbling skin feels like a loss and victory in one. When Elena dares her, she smiles for a long minute.

 

“Jump in the lake”, Elena says. “No clothes, no easing yourself in. Just climb onto that rock and jump.”

 

Caroline smiles back, drains her drink, and climbs.

 

Jumping is easy, you just let your body go. Drowning is easy for the same reason Not drowning is harder, because your mind is telling you  _ sink sink sink _ .

 

When the water covers her head completely, icy and numb over the long expanse of her skin, Caroline stops thinking, and for a gorgeous moment she cares about nothing and allows herself to float.

 

*

 

The night she packs her things she accidentally burns the dress she wore on the first day of highschool. It just slips into the path of a candle and goes up, catching her arm on the way. It takes longer than it should to heal, still pinkish and soft when she’s on the ground running, night opening straight up around her. 

 

Halfway out of the state, the headlights of a car light her up, both of them stopped at once and waiting for the other to move. A girl sticks her head out of the window, dirty hair, cheap perfume that she can smell from twenty feet away. 

 

“Caroline Forbes?” The girl asks, eyes flashing gold. 

 

Caroline nods. The burn on her arm sings, skin vibrating. 

 

“I’m Rose. Rose Tyler, and it’s about time we met.”

 

*

 

Vicky stops her one night. She’s high and she’s cold and shaking and her fingers are all numb from gliding over skin and her nails want to dig hard into whatever softness will yield to her. Vicky presses her palm onto Caroline’s chest and pushes her back.

 

“I can’t,” she says. “I need to stop this.” Her hands are shaking and Caroline’s are too and everything is shaking in a frightening way, the atmosphere an extension of them.

 

A month later, Vicky is dead.

 

By the end of the year, so is Caroline, fingers numb all over again. 

 

*

 

“I’m hungry”, she says to Rose, hotel sheets warmed under their skin.

 

“Good”, Rose says. “Me too. Let's knick a car and look for something worthy.”

 

They shrug on clothes, leave the desk staff with blown pupils and sad-sorry dreams, and hit the road.

 

The universe is just another thing. What's a control freak without chaos?

**Author's Note:**

> whether this is the prequel to [that place on the corner](https://archiveofourown.org/works/1507580) is absolutely reader's discretion, but the personalities vary quite a lot between the two. borderline au of an au? lol @ myself and kelsey


End file.
